American multinational technology company Microsoft has been hit by its second outage in two weeks.
Striking the company on April Fool's Day, the substantial cloud outage knocked Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, Teams, Office 365, and OneDrive offline. Skype, Xbox Live, and Bing were also impacted.
News of the outage began emanating from Twitter users at around 5pm ET yesterday. The situation was confirmed by website DownDetector, which reported receiving thousands of notices about the outage from users of Office, Teams, and Xbox Live.
At 5:39pm, Microsoft’s Azure Support account on Twitter shared a message acknowledging that all was not well. It stated: "We are aware of an issue affecting the Azure Portal and Azure services, please visit our alternate Status Page here status2.azure.com for more information and updates."
A tweet posted by the Microsoft 365 Twitter status account revealed the cause of the outage, revealing that a “DNS issue affecting multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services” was being investigated.
An hour after the problem arose, Microsoft tweeted to say that it was evaluating its mitigation options. By 6:30pm, the company had managed to bring the Azure status page back online.
Visitors were greeted with the message that they may experience "intermittent issues" while Microsoft grappled with a worldwide outage impacting network infrastructure in every region.
The tech company's solution, shared on Twitter at 6:33pm, was to reroute traffic "to our resilient DNS capabilities" and to continue to "investigate the cause of the DNS issue."
At 10:37pm ET, the MSFT365Status account reported that the problem had been overcome, sharing the message: "We've successfully resolved the issue that was causing residual impact for SharePoint Online and we've confirmed that all Microsoft 365 services have returned to a healthy state."
The incident comes only two weeks after Microsoft Azure was affected by an outage that took Teams, Office 365, and Xbox Live offline for four hours. Unlike yesterday's DNS issue, the March 15 outage was caused by "a recent change to an authentication system," according to Microsoft.